Fantasy Film Suggestions

[Foxbat]

Monty Python: Holy Grail - The Lego Version of the song 'Knights Of The Round Table' is worth a review in itself

[mr furious]

the best fantasy film is mystery men starring ben stiller

[ScottSF]

My thoughts on the 13th Warrior

I think this is one of those movies that gets it right. It’s on my list of things to own. I must admit, when I saw it in the theaters when it first came out, it went over my head. I was hoping for a more fantastical movie. I really wanted the fire worm to be a real dragon. What I got instead where real slices of an imagined culture based on history. I think what the movie really had going for it was the theme of culture clash. Some of the most enjoyable moments were when the Vikings prejudged Ahmad concerning his small horse and small scimitar and he was able to make them eat their words (after he learned their words). It was nice to see them reassess their ideas of “power” i.e. brute strength vs. agility or a sword’s size vs. its sharpness.

What I didn’t know the first time I saw it was that it was a re-telling of Beowulf. I saw it again after reading Beowulf for the first time and the realization was like a peppermint axe splitting my brain. It showed how reality becomes myth when a story is passed to the next generation. I heard that the length of the movie was cut down which is unfortunate; I wonder what kind of moments were cut. I do think it could have been better, given more time to breathe, but it still had a great character that stays with me years after seeing it. Now I am tempted to read the book “Eater’s of the Dead” that the movie was based on to see what didn’t make it in.


One down!

[Spiritdragon]

Just watched BEOWULF and GRENDEL!!
Reminded me of the 13th Warrior...but more realistic!!
It was a sad and fascinating movie with beautiful scenery and a captivating story....based on the ancient poem of the same name...

[ScottSF]

yeah, I read a indifferent review of it but I want to see it for myself. Now I have more feul to that fire.

[Rosemary]

Originally Posted by Spiritdragon

Just watched BEOWULF and GRENDEL!!
Reminded me of the 13th Warrior...but more realistic!!
It was a sad and fascinating movie with beautiful scenery and a captivating story....based on the ancient poem of the same name...

Now this one I do have to see! Beowulf, one of the best of ancient poems for me...

[j. d. worthington]

I see a listing for Harryhausen's Jason, but none for The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, nor Mysterious Island nor First Men in the Moon, all of which definitely deserve mention, as well as others that he did... There are also the exceptional sff films of the 1950s (those that rose above the generic mutant monster menace), such as The Incredible Shrinking Man, which remains an intelligent film today... Even THEM! has much to recommend it, as does the original The Thing from Another Planet, at very least as a suspenseful first contact film. An odd, flawed, but rather worthwhile film for the curious handling of an unusual idea (for the time) is The Curse of the Faceless Man... There are some odd little gems of the second and third water waiting to be rediscovered in those old 1950s sf films... look for ones directed by Edward Cahn... they're low-budget, and on the surface the typical sort of thing, but he actually did quite a competent job of bringing life to some very hackneyed plots... and he worked with people like Jerome Bixby for the scripts...

[Nesacat]

The Saragossa Manuscript (1965).

Directed by Wojciech Has, the film is an adaptation of at least part of a legendary, massive novel by Count Jan Potocki (1761-1815). The Manuscript Found in Saragossa (1813) was his crowning work, favorably compared to The Decameron and The Arabian Nights for its rich folkloric elements, supernatural motifs, humor, and surreal touches. Like its predecessors it has a very modern, labyrinthine, story-within-a-story structure, but it’s even more multilayered.

The film version is a mostly faithful adaptation of this literary cat’s cradle. Zbigniew Cybulski stars as Alphonse van Worden, a young Belgian captain of the Walloon guards traveling through the arid landscapes of 17th-century Spain on his way to Madrid.

In an abandoned house he becomes entranced by an old book (the "Saragossa manuscript") that chronicles the life of one of his famous ancestors. He becomes so spellbound that he fails to notice the group of enemy soldiers that have come to arrest him. In the first of many twists, they too succumb to the book’s spell, and the action moves into a series of dreamlike adventures starring Alphonse and a gallery of memorable characters.

In the first of these adventures, he meets two princesses — actually ghosts — who alternately terrorise and seduce him, finally proposing a series of tests he must pass. On the verge of succumbing to their charms, he suddenly awakens next to a gallows on which two corpses are hung. This kind of collision of the horrific with the sensual permeates the film.

This scene only occupies the first ten or fifteen minutes of the film, but it sets the tone for what follows. From there, the story escalates into a series of increasingly complex enchantments. Alphonse is captured by the Inquisition in a fetish-drenched sequence, complete with metal masks and a rack. He fends off ghosts, fights duels, frequently wakes up to find himself in the shadow of the gallows, and best of all, listens as we do to a series of richly detailed stories of cuckolded husbands, treacherous business rivals, and deals with the devil told by those he encounters in what may or may not be a dream.



Besides the convoluted structure, characters pop in and out of each other’s stories with random logic. The ghost-princesses meander in and out of several of the other stories, moving mysteriously in the background or popping up in other guises. Sudden, startling imagery like Alphonse reaching out to touch one of these ghostly girls but finding his hand on a corpse recur throughout.



And of course no one is who he or she seems. The kindly hermit priest who takes Alphonse in and counsels him on how to avoid perdition turns out to be a shiek who claims he’s arranged all the scenarios and hired the players to enact them in the interest of Alphonse’s enlightenment. The priest’s howling, allegedly demon-possessed assistant Pasheko, whose eye is removed and eaten by ghouls in a gruesome scene, is revealed as an acrobat who was blinded in a fall.


Has deserves praise for bringing Potocki’s droll anti-clericalism to the fore. When the Inquisitors grab Alphonse, they’re amusingly blasé about their methods: "His confession," one of them says, "though slightly forced, has its advantages." Bracing, too, is the film’s charming sense of the value of camaraderie. During one of the later stories — a Byzantine affair involving rival bankers, a naïve son, a coquettish daughter, and a trickster who manipulates them all for his own amusement — one of the characters says "Good company is more precious than wealth or black magic." There’s plenty of wealth and black magic in the film, but it’s also enthralling good company.

[j. d. worthington]

Now, this one sounds a delight! Thanks for the wonderful review, Nesa... I'm going to have to see if I can't track this one down.

[Teresa Edgerton]

It does sound like an amazing film.

I just searched the catalogue for our local library system, and the branch I usually frequent has it! (Although it's been checked out just at the moment.)

[Nesacat]

I hope the both of you enjoy the movie. I watched with a friend and she actually got out a pencil and paper to keep track of all the different layers and we ended up watching it twice. The book is equally wonderful.

[-putawaythosepliers-]

Originally Posted by Foxbat

Monty Python: Holy Grail - The Lego Version of the song 'Knights Of The Round Table' is worth a review in itself

yes it's great...

when dining here in camelot we eat ham and jam and spamalot!!!

ahhh monty python is great! holy grail is excellent, but And Here's Something Completely Different and The Life Of Brian is great too. The Meaning of Life has some great laughs as well.
watching monty python with friends is recommended.

my friends and i love the part in the holy grail with the knights of ni and the shrubberies...

i am a shrubber. my name is roger the shrubber. shrubberies are my trade. i arrange, design, and sell shrubberies.

nooooo no shrubberies here!

okkkkkk.... i'll go now...

[Teresa Edgerton]

I went to the library yesterday and The Saragossa Manuscript was in, hiding on the very last bottom shelf of the S's (though I would have expected better from a library, they group them by initial letter like a video store, rather than alphabetize them further) so I was able to bring it home with me. Very happy about that. Now to reserve a good chunk of time to watch it. (And hope that the video is in decent shape.)

[Nesacat]

City of Lost Children (1995)

The version I have is the original in French with sub-titles and not the dubbed one.

City of Lost Children is written and directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet and it's a disturbed fairy tale filled with visual extravaganza of the most intricate kind.

The tale revolves around Krank (Daniel Emilfork), a bizarre man, prematurely aged, who suffers from the inability to dream. Krank lives with the diminutive Mademoiselle Bismuth (Mireille Mosse), six clones (Domnique Pinon) who suffer from narcolepsy, and a wise, but migraine enduring, brain in a tank. A scientist – the “original” that the clones were based upon – now long missing, created the entire troupe, each with their own flaws; each imperfect. Driven insane by his inability to dream, his lost innocent youth, Krank enlists the aid of the Cyclops – a gang of mechanically enhanced men – to kidnap children and bring them to his isolated artificial island. By inserting the sleeping children into a dream machine, Krank hopes to take their dreams as his own, and regain his innocence, and perhaps his youth.

Among the victims of the Cyclops’ raids is Denree (a very young, and perpetually wide eyed, Joseph Lucien who says nothing but eats and burps pretty much every single time he appears on screen) who happens to be the adopted brother of One (Ron Perlman). Now a strongman in a fair (having given up his whaling ways), One falls in with a gang of child thieves, led by the emotionally mature Miette (Judith Vittet). Together, One and Miette seek to rescue Denree and the other children from the evil clutches of Krank and his “family”.

This is a twisted, bizarre, world. It is filled with men like the blind Cyclops who see with the aid of a single, mechanical, eye. It is home to the conjoint twins known as “the Octopus” who keep the gang of child thieves under their power. It presents Marcello (Jean-Claude Dreyfuss) as a washed up freak show proprietor who now, in a flea-eye view sequence, uses his trained flea as an assassin. The film simply drips imagination and colour. It presents a fabulously intricate fairy tale amongst a dark and fantastic world. A fairy tale full of evil and monsters yet thoughtful and fascinating – full of what it means to be young. Lost Children is wonderfully Dahl-esque and captures the spirit of fairy tales. Wicked things happen to wicked people, and the movie pulls no punches.

Teresa ... tell me what you think of Saragossa Manuscript.

[Memnoch]

I have seen every 1 of those films oh my god!!!!!! Is that sad or fanatical!!

Flight of Dragons (Cartoon film) - I watched over and over as a kid!! lol